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JENNY SAVILLE

Jenny Saville paints female nudes in extreme states of grotesque exaggeration—deformed, obese, brutalized, or mutilated—working against the male-dominated history of idealized portraits of women. “I want to be a painter of modern life, and modern bodies,” she says. The morbidity of Saville’s human subjects, often bleeding or violently gripping their own flesh, bears a stark resemblance to her portraits of butchered animals, both grotesque and objectified. Working in a style with various links to Lucien Freud andPeter Paul Rubens, Saville takes many of her themes and subjects from a critical observation of everyday people—American women in shopping malls, patients being prepped for liposuction, and even her childhood piano teacher. “I was fascinated by the way her two breasts would become one,” she says of the latter, “the way her fat moved, the way it hung on the back of her arms.” REF

The way she has textured these painting makes it appear more graphic and grotesque, she has layered the paint over each other you and see the squared brushstrokes and it’s less focused on being perfect but more about showing the depth and shape within the skin.

The top left image to me provokes horror and uneasiness, his eyes are wide and rounded and he’s looking directly at you. His eyes give you this feeling of terror, the white against the black contrast against each other and make the stare between him and the viewer that much more intense.

The colours through all the paintings appear quite muddy and and use darker tones with highlights show the depth, the tones of colours provokes this feeling of disgust and reality.